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Questions and Answers with
President Stukel - Part 2
Q: Is online education the
future?
A: Well, it’s certainly a part
of the future. If you look at the growth in enrollments here on
online education, it has really grown quite rapidly, and it’s
because it’s very convenient for individuals who are off campus.
They can take their courses at the time that is convenient to
them and at a very reasonable cost.
If you look long term, the
residential campus will always remain. It isn’t going to be
replaced by online education. But if you look where the needs
are – the needs in terms of higher education, especially
degree-completion programs – then online education is going to
be a very big deal. So, if you look at where the greatest
expansion will be for higher education, it’s going to be in
online courses.
Now, if you look at UIS in
particular, I was visiting … a legislator up north. I walked
into her office, and I was going there to talk about the U of I
and about legislative things and the budgets – things that
presidents talk to legislators about. And she reaches over on
her desk, and she pulls off a brochure, and she says, “This is
the most important activity of the University of Illinois in my
district,” and it was the UIS online program. And it’s because
there’s so many families who need extra courses to get their
degree, or they want to begin a course of study in higher
education. It’s the only way they can do it.
So, just think of a family both
working, have children, they aren’t going to be able to come to
a residential campus. It’s just not in the cards. But yet, if
you look at where our society is going, you need to have
education in order to do almost anything these days. So, online
education will be a very important part of the mix of higher
education alternatives.
Q: There’s been some talk …
about the possibility of creating online programs that mirror
our on-campus programs. To what extent do you think that would
be in the best interests of UIS, and for the mission of UIS and
the university in general?
A: Well, what do you mean by
mirror, just so I know exactly what you’re talking about?
Q: Well, there have been a few
different ideas thrown out. One was in the grant proposal that
was sent over to the Sloan Foundation. There were a few
references to the possibility of increasing the … online
enrollments to being 50 percent of the … campus’ total
enrollments. And then, I’ve also read other things where it’s
been mentioned, the idea of a mirror campus, as basically being
[one that says], “We offer the same programs that we offer on
campus online.” So, you can address both of those or one.
A: Well, that’s a faculty issue
that I’m sure they’ll work out. … At other institutions that I
know about, it’s not unusual to have a course that you can take
either in the classroom, or you can take the course online. As a
matter of fact, there are courses at other campuses where they
do exactly that. There are many students who opt to do it online
just because it’s more convenient.
Q: Or because it’s easier?
A: No, it’s the same course.
Q: Continue, but that’s one of
my concerns.
A: What, that it’s easier,
meaning being less difficult?
Q: There’s a concern that having
online classes is actually going to make getting a degree from U
of I even easier because … even though I can take an on-campus
class, … I can stay at home and take an easier course online.
A: Well, here we’re talking
about the same courses. It’s identical course being offered in
the classroom or being offered online. … But, that’s going on in
other places. You’d have to talk to your faculty leadership
here, but that’s going on in other places. And, they are the
identical courses. They take the same tests, and they do that
sort of thing.
But, in some ways, it’s a matter
of taste. There are some individuals that just don’t want to do
it online. That’s just not their thing. Others enjoy doing
things online. Again, it’s a matter of taste. … I’ve known
students who would never take an online course. I mean, they
want to be in the classroom, they want to have the personal
interaction with the [faculty and other students], and that’s
how they learn. Others could care less about ever going to a
classroom. They like to get up in the middle of the night or
whenever the spirit moves them and do their online work.
There are also many courses that
are hybred. That is, you have a lecture, but then all other
communications are done by e-mail; and it’s around the clock,
and it’s available all the time. And how does that work? … Just
take a math course. You have a math lecture in person, and there
are problem assignments. So, what you do is that as you’re
working through your assignment, if you’re stuck and need help,
you go online. There’s a graduate assistant online all the time,
and they answer your question. And that information is made
available to everybody in the class. So, you can go online and
see who are other folks having problems, and you can learn as
well from your questions – you can learn, and then vice versa.
So, that goes on at Urbana quite
a bit. There are a lot of courses that are just hybred, where
you do have the personal human interaction in the classroom, but
all other contact – in terms of problems, in terms of help
sessions, in terms of questions – are all done … online
throughout the night.
Q: What do you think that the
movement toward online means for higher education across the
board, in terms of undergraduates getting a degree? … Let’s
accept the argument that those who are nontraditional students
would prefer online because of the convenience. For
undergraduates and for the traditional student, what do you
think it means for higher ed as a whole that we can try to
create the same thing online that should be in the classroom?
A: Well, the reality of online
education is that it’s here to stay. There are a lot of
for-profit higher education … entities. University of Phoenix is
the … best known here, but there are lots of these that are now
starting up that are for-profit higher education institutions.
So, online education is here to stay.
Q: Does that make it right?
A: It doesn’t make it right, but
the things that I’ve read about – and, of course U of I does a
lot of this – our experience has been that the quality is not
diminished providing that the faculty prepare the materials
correctly. The thing you can’t do is you cannot take a lecture
that you would give in the classroom and just tape it, and that
becomes the online education experience. That will not work.
That’ll fail.
What you have to do if you’re
going to have a high-quality online course – which there are
many here – is you have to start from scratch and look at the
media, look at the tools that are available to you, and then you
have to build your course to get across the information that you
wish. And it’s only by doing it that way that you can maintain
quality and have quality control over it. That’s hard work. That
isn’t easy. It’s very hard to create a course that’s really high
quality.
So, if you have high-quality
online courses, … the experience and the outcomes – in terms of
material transferred, material learned, material and knowledge
that leaves with you after you leave the course – will be pretty
much identical. I think that’s been proven more than once now.
But, the caveat is the online course has to be built from
scratch. It just can’t be a classroom course that’s taped.
That’s the crudest way of doing it, but … a new course has to be
created using the tools available, and that’s expensive too.
Q: One of the biggest concerns
that we have here is that there was talk at the end of last year
that if students had something that they wanted to say that they
needed to do it in a free speech zone. Can you talk about that
policy that the U of I is discussing? U of I as a whole is …
apparently discussing a policy that would be universal for all
three campuses.
A: I’ve not been involved in
that dialogue. I don’t know the answer to that. Tell me about
it.
Q: Well, we heard that the U of
I is discussing some policy that wouldn’t necessarily define the
lines of the free speech zone, but would come up with criteria
in which students have to do this, this and this in order to
have the ability to [communicate certain types messages on
campus].
A: This has not been brought to
my attention yet, so I really can’t comment on it. … When I was
in Chicago and I was chancellor there, it was during a time – I
guess it’s still the time – when the Palestinian and the Israeli
students on campus were kind of going at it. And, we did
establish areas where they could do their protesting, but they
couldn’t protest … everywhere.
But I hadn’t heard about the
free speech zones…It really has not come to my attention, but I
would think as a general proposition free speech is what a
university’s all about.
Q: What are you doing to ensure
that the U of I is living up to its civic responsibility of
ensuring that undergraduates and graduate students are doing
more than learning of the ABCs?
A: Well, the general-education
courses and those curriculums are always under review. I know
they are being reviewed at at least two of the campuses. The
general-education requirements and the core courses that are a
part of that, their purpose is to do exactly that, is to make
you a good citizen of the U.S. and a citizen of the world. It’s
to make you intellectually broadly educated, whatever that
means. But you know what I mean.
Q: What is the U of I
specifically doing in order to ensure that?
A: Well, again, it’s really a
faculty issue, isn’t it? The faculty’s role is curriculum, and
it’s not administrators’ role. Faculty are the ones who
determine what you learn, how you learn and when you learn,
basically.
Just having an educated
populace, period, is terribly important for our democracy. What
I worry about, along those lines, is the number of members of
our society who are not even getting out of high school. You
look at dropout rates in the major urban areas, and you think
about our democracy. Think about that. In Chicago, there are
roughly 400,000 kids in K-12. Then, think of Detroit, Baltimore,
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and
add up the number of K-12ers each year that are leaving school
without graduating from … grade school or high school, and
becoming voters and becoming members of our society.
As that number grows, you’ve got
to wonder about the stress on our democracy. At a time when
knowledge is so important, when information is so readily
available from all kinds of sources, … there has to be some
judgment as to how you react to information given to you. And
the more educated you are, the more apt you are to be critical
and to be questioning and not just to accept what you see on
cable TV or whatever.
So, I worry about every year the
number of young adults that go out into our society not having
been educated, even at the minimal level, and that number keeps
growing. So, we’ve just got to deal with that as a society. I
don’t have the answer to it, but that just points up how
important college-educated people are in terms of our society to
help with that problem.
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